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I wish that something could be done with that horrible yellow and orange power station across the street from this site. It would be nice if verticle wall containing water falls were built all around it.

Alexico always uses Kondylis. Their two current buildings u/c are the Remy and the one at 67th/1st....above average Kondylis buildings. If it indeed rises over 800 feet tall, it's going to have a heck of a prominence anywhere south of Madison Square. It has to be great building. I doubt it'll be another 10 Barclay....that's just another of Glenwood's horrible cheap buildings.

Expansions are rarely easy in space-challenged Manhattan, and sometimes it’s just easier to chuck an address and move elsewhere. But as officials at New York Law School in TriBeCa are demonstrating, it can pay to stay in place, if a real estate owner is able to think creatively to extract as much value as possible from a property and to make a move at exactly the right moment.

Founded in 1891, New York Law is an independent law school that is primarily within a block bordered by Worth, Leonard and Church Streets and West Broadway. With the sale last year of its library building at 240 Church Street to a developer, the school is now housed mostly in three crowded, haphazardly connected buildings on Worth Street.

Those buildings, however, will ultimately be gutted and renovated and tied in more closely with a new building. The $190 million expansion and renovation plan is aimed at keeping the school open and operating at its present site, while almost doubling its size, to 361,000 square feet from 191,000.

The centerpiece of the expansion will be a new 235,000-square-foot nine-level glass-sheathed building whose foundation is being laid at a site that formerly held the school’s parking lot and a 10,000-square-foot residential building at 54 Leonard.

Once the new building is finished, the school, which has about 1,500 students, will begin overhauling its buildings on Worth. Those buildings are now so cramped that a conference room also serves as a dining room, faculty offices are scattered, and the bookstore is housed in “closetlike” basement space at 47 Worth Street, said Richard A. Matasar, the dean and president.

Mr. Matasar said his school desperately needed more space, not just for classrooms but also for additional administrative offices, an auditorium and small teaching spaces. It also needs space, he said, so that it can better group its seven academic centers, which focus on areas like business law and policy. “Right now, there is no logic to where you are here,” he said. “We want people to be able to work together.”

At New York Law, expansion plans did not fall into place readily. After first looking into a large expansion in the mid-1970s — but never finding a way to pay for it — the school began pursuing an expansion again in 2003.

It soon discovered that while the real estate market had softened, development costs were rising quickly. The first fear was that the only way it could afford to grow would be to first sell its four buildings and use the money to move to less expensive quarters farther downtown.

In the end, however, school officials decided to stay in TriBeCa, partly because the prospect of looking for temporary space elsewhere was too daunting and also because the school already had an enviable location near many government agencies, courts and law firms.

Working closely with brokers at Studley, the real estate service company, as well as architects at SmithGroup, the officials came up with an alternate plan. It called for first improving the appeal of the school’s four-story library site at 240 Church Street so that it might attract a residential developer, and then erecting a new building on the site of the old parking lot and the building next door.

Still, hurdles were everywhere. To increase chances that a new owner would be able to build a tall residential tower on the library site, the school transferred air rights from the parking lot to that building and then found a temporary home for its library: leased space in a building at 40 Worth Street.
It also acquired the building at 54 Leonard, which looked as if it might get in the way of construction and which also offered transferable air rights.

The school’s parking lot, meanwhile, was zoned for development that was five stories or less, not enough for everything that was planned. One answer would be to build below grade, but that would be a challenge because the area’s water table is exceptionally high and the site sits between noisy subway lines.

By the summer of 2006, prospects were looking up, however. TriBeCa’s residential real estate market had rebounded, and the school found buyers for its library building: the Alexico Group, a New York-based developer and Dune Capital, an equity partner.

It then used the proceeds, $136 million, to nearly quadruple its endowment, and that in turn helped it to get $135 million in tax-exempt bonds from the New York City Industrial Development Agency to finance construction of the new building. It is scheduled to open in the fall of 2008.

“We had a lot of transactions that had to come together simultaneously in a relatively small window of opportunity, and we still had to keep the school open,” said Howard Nottingham, a broker at Studley. In April, Mr. Nottingham, as well as Woody Heller, another Studley broker, received one of the “most ingenious deal of the year” awards that are handed out annually by the Real Estate Board of New York.

Mark Maves, an architect at the Washington office for SmithGroup, a planning and engineering firm that designed the school’s expansion, said a turning point for the project came some three years ago. His firm, with the help of Thornton Tomasetti, a New York-based structural engineering firm, realized it could build a large enough structure for the law school by building four stories underground, using a construction technique called a slurry wall.
“This is now one of the deepest slurry wall basements in Lower Manhattan,” he said.

He added that to cut down on noise from the subway lines, his firm had designed the new building so that classrooms will be both architecturally cushioned from public areas like elevators and hallways, and also have separate columns and beams.

One defining design feature of the new building will be its public space: on the top four floors, student lounge areas and hallways will sit directly behind 200-foot-long glass corridors that run along the exterior walls of the building, allowing passers-by to see inside.

Mr. Matasar, the school’s dean, clearly hopes the design will improve his school’s visibility. “Introverted buildings are traditional in education, but an extroverted building will let the world know what we do here,” he said. “We want people to know that we’re alive inside.”

The buildings on the north side of the block bounded by Worth / Church / Leonard / West Broadway where
these new buildings will rise have been almost fully cleared; foundation work is underway on the former parking lot ...

The entire site seen from Leonard / West Broadway (with 66 Leonard at upper left and the NYLS buildings along Worth at the right):

The site looking west (from the Church Street doorway of 66 Leonard):

Looking west across the site towards yet another development site across W. B'way at 34 Leonard
(the former site of Buster's Garage, below the sign reading "LOUIS PROVENZANO"):